Startup Tabula Turns to Intel As Manufacturing Partner

Intel regards its costly factory network as a key competitive weapon, built to churn out chips that are designed by its own engineers. But there has been a relaxation of that policy lately, one that some much smaller companies are starting to exploit.

The latest is Tabula, an amply financed startup that has developed an unusual kind of programmable chip. On Tuesday it is announcing a deal with Intel, which has agreed to serve as manufacturer for Tabula’s next generation of products.

Such build-to-order manufacturers, known as foundries, have served chip designers for decades. What’s a bit unusual is that Intel is willing to share its most advanced production process–a recipe of materials and manufacturing steps that define attributes like the speed and power consumption of chips–with external customers.

Intel’s latest process creates circuitry measured at 22 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, an indicator of how many transistors can be packed on a piece of silicon. It includes an unusual three-dimensional transistor design, which helps boost performance and save power compared with so-called planar technologies that are ordinarily used to make components on the surface of silicon wafers.

Intel’s first 22-nanometer microprocessors, known by the code name Ivy Bridge, are not expected to start arriving in computers until sometime in the second quarter.

Tabula, based in Intel’s own home town of Santa Clara, Calif., uses a 40-nanometer process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. for its existing chips. For its next generation, however, the company says the appeal of Intel’s new technology was strong.

“It represents a very significant performance edge, which we looked at and we concluded was great fit,” says Dennis Segers, Tabula’s chief executive.

The other announced user of the new unit dubbed Intel Custom Foundry is Achronix Semiconductor, which also makes programmable chips. That’s not a coincidence; besides microprocessors, few other variety of chips demand quite so many transistors as chips that are designed to be configured by customers to take on an assortment of tasks.

Chuck Mulloy, an Intel spokesman, said the unit has more than two customers but others are not disclosing their plans yet. While external customers, in theory, could help Intel fill up its factories if it ever faced a dearth in demand for its microprocessors, the company has said the main motivation for entering the foundry business is learning attributes of other kinds of chips that could serve its own interests.

“It’s a small amount of volume,” Mulloy says, referring to the expected production needs of its external customers, “and growing very incrementally.”

Tabula, which in March of last year put its total investment to date at $214 million, departs from the customary approach of electrically programming the transistors on a chip to carry out one set of tasks. Rather, it uses multiple stored sets of instructions, called folds, which are successively loaded into chips, executed and replaced by other instructions, a concept it calls Spacetime.

Segers says Tabula will disclose details about the capabilities and pricing of its next generation of chips later.